HEGEMON OF

THASOS  , Greek writer of the old comedy, nicknamed cDaK.ij from his fondness for lentils . Hardly anything is known of him, except that he flourished during the Peloponnesian War . According to Aristotle (Poetics, ii . 5) he was the inventor of a kind of parody; by slightly altering the wording in well-known poems he transformed the- sublime into the ridiculous . When the news of the disaster in Sicily reached Athens, his parody of the Gigantomachia was being performed; it is said that the audience were so amused by it that, instead of leaving to show their grief, they remained in their seats . He was also the author of a comedy called Philinne (Philine), written in the manner of Eupolis and Cratinus, in which he attacked a well-known courtesan . Athenaeus (p . 698), who preserves some parodic hexameters of his, relates other anecdotes concerning him (pp . 5, ro8, 407) . Fragments in T . Kock, Comicorum Atticorum fragmenta, i . (188o) ; B .

J . Pcltzer, De parodica Graecorum poesi (1855) .